Larian Studios - Next Projects Update

Lar has penned an update at the Larian forums discussing their next projects - or at least, they are in planning and pre-production and presumably waiting for a publisher green-light or similar.  Lar says he needs to be cryptic at this very early stage but, to be honest, it's fairly transparent all things considered:

Some months ago, in one of the status updates, I promised I wanted to be more open about the development of our next games. I'd like to start doing that, but out of necessity still need to be cryptic about certain things.

So currently we have 2 Divinity projects in pre-production - The first one, code named project E features a top-down camera whereas the other one, code named project D, has a camera similar to DKS but obviously with certain improvements.

They are both in pre-production meaning that would ordinarily mean that it's unsure that they'll make it to market, but I think there'll be an announcement in the next couple of weeks that guarantees at least one of the two will make it to production, and I'd actually be surprised if the second one doesn't make it either. I'm the most biased person on the planet when it comes to Divinity games, but I am under the impression that they're both uber-cool games and that I'd like to play them both. If past experience is anything to go by, that means that somehow we'll manage to get them made.

Talking about project E, the top-down thing has disadvantages when it comes to immersion, but it makes up in terms of some of the content things we can pull off with it. You can think of E as the original Divinity in a modern jacket augmented with many of the insights we gained over the course of they years and some new things we'd like to try out (with the caveat that those sometimes work, and sometimes don't). It certainly looks nice, and many of the ideas in there fit with what you've all been writing of things you want in our forums. Some don't however; ) I'd really like to show you some early screenshots, but since that would be a first announcement, it'd make it all over the web, and it might cause mis-interpretation which would take a long time to set right, so we'll refrain from that for the moment.

D, well, that one does *one* thing which I expect several in this industry will tell us is insane, for probably good reasons, but I can't help but thinking that it'll make for really cool gameplay so we'll try it out nonetheless - I'm being a bit cryptic about it because D's development has two roads it can follow, and I don't know which one it'll be yet. I do know which one I'd prefer, but that's the one that'll cost tons of cash and we still need to figure out if we can get someone crazy enough to share our belief that that's a game that should be made. To be fair, we haven't shown it to anybody yet, so I have no clue if it actually requires craziness, or instead people will jump on it, but the plan is to start showing it around at GDC, so we'll see what that gives.

What I can tell you about D is that it *should* take care of one of the frustrations I personally still had with DKS i.e. getting the dragon thing really right. Given the scope of DKS we never could focus sufficient development resources on that, and to avoid that from happening with D we started pre-production by focussing completely on the dragon thing. In my mind, there still hasn't been a game that got the feeling of being a powerful beast of destruction right (and fun), and that's going to be one of the core ambitions with D. Should it turn out that it doesn't work, it won't be for lack of trying

While I'm writing, I also wanted to thank you all for the feedback we're getting in here - I'm often amazed by how crystal accurate some of the analysis is, and for us it's like mana from heaven in terms of getting our design focused. Even Kein's continuous frontal assaults are a great source of inspiration

Thanks, Alrik!